Ecolabelling of Seafood: The Basic Concepts - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 2

experience with the main fisheries seafood ecolabelling programme (MSC) (May
et al . 2003), it is only now that consumers and the wild-capture fishing industry
are becoming fully aware of the actual impacts, costs and benefits of this form of
seafood ecolabelling. The long lead time is partly because many of the potential
environmental benefits that could flow from ecolabelling take a long time to be
expressed, but also because it is only recently that there has been a substantial
amount of ecolabelled seafood in the marketplace, and there is widespread industry
and consumer attention. Nonetheless, after a decade of operations of the MSC and
the recent rise of several other certification systems, it is now timely to consider the
concepts in more detail, catalogue the experiences of the various participants and
consider the future for seafood ecolabelling.
The perspective of the topic is global, and includes examples from both wild-
capture fisheries and aquaculture ventures. The chapters are intended to present
ecolabelling concepts and issues from a broad perspective so that seafood con-
sumers, resellers, processors and fishers can be better informed about the role and
quality of individual seafood ecolabels they may encounter and enable them to make
more meaningful decisions about the costs and benefits of ecolabelled seafood and
certification systems. In particular, each chapter provides an analysis of the topic
in terms of the history and development, and identifies aspects that are considered
to have been keys to successes.
The various facets of seafood ecolabelling are presented within four themes in
the topic. Chapters 1-10 provide an overview of the global context for seafood
ecolabelling and certification, including the interactions with global markets, na-
tional jurisdictions and ecosystem uncertainty. It is within this milieu that seafood
certification and ecolabelling must operate to create market-based incentives
for production and marketing of more sustainable seafood. The second theme -
Chapters 11-15 - provides selected case studies of specific certification and
ecolabelling experiences, concluding with a discussion of the somewhat unique
circumstances of certification for small-scale fisheries in developing countries.
Chapters 16-19 present four different certification initiatives that use ratings and
guides to provide purchasing recommendations for seafood, seeking to achieve
similar sustainable outcomes to those sought by the more formal ecolabelling pro-
grammes. The final theme - Chapters 20 and 21 - provides perspectives from an
analysis of what our short experience with seafood market-based incentives predicts
for the future of sustainable seafood and the health of ocean ecosystems.

1.2 Ecolabelling programmes

An ecolabelling programme is a system used to create a market-based incentive
to encourage products that can demonstrate they are produced in an ecologically
sustainable manner. The incentive is created in the marketplace through the selec-
tive purchasing power of consumers, who preferentially purchase products marked